How The Mormons Make Money

Bloomberg the Company & Its Products v

Bloomberg Anywhere Login | Bloomberg Terminal Demo Request

Bloomberg

Sign In Subscribe

How the Mormons Make
Money

How the Mormon Church Makes Its Billions

by empty text Caroline Winter empty text

f

pdfcrowd.com

■ The Church of Latter-day Saints has amassed financial holdings worth billions. Here's an inside look at its
business empire (Illustration by Labour) illustration by Labour

Late last March the Mormon Church completed an ambitious project: a
megamall. Built for roughly $2 billion, the City Creek Center stands directly
across the street from the church’s iconic neo-Gothic temple in Salt Lake City.
The mall includes a retractable glass roof, 5,000 underground parking spots,
and nearly 100 stores and restaurants, ranging from Tiffany’s to Forever 21.
Walkways link the open-air emporium with the church’s perfectly manicured
headquarters on Temple Square. Macy’s is a stone’s throw from the offices of
the church’s president, Thomas S. Monson, whom Mormons believe to be a
living prophet.

On the morning of its grand opening, thousands of shoppers thronged
downtown Salt Lake, eager to elbow their way into the stores. The national
anthem played, and Henry B. Eyring, one of Monson’s top counselors, told the
crowds, “Everything that we see around us is evidence of the long-standing
commitment of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints to Salt Lake
City.” When it came time to cut the mall’s flouncy pink ribbon, Monson, flanked
by Utah dignitaries, cheered, “One, two, three— let’s go shopping!”

open in browser PRO version

Watching a religious leader celebrate a mall may seem surreal, but City Creek
reflects the spirit of enterprise that animates modern-day Mormonism. The
mall is part of a sprawling church-owned corporate empire that the Mormon
leadership says is helping spread its message, increasing economic self-reliance,
and building the Kingdom of God on earth. “The Church of Jesus Christ of
Latter-day Saints attends to the total needs of its members,” says Keith B.
McMullin, who for 37 years served within the Mormon leadership and now

heads a church-owned holding company, Deseret Management Corp. (DMC), an
Are you a developer? Try out the HTML to PDF API

umbrella organization for many of the church’s for-profit businesses. “We look
to not only the spiritual but also the temporal, and we believe that a person who
is impoverished temporally cannot blossom spiritually.”

McMullin explains that City Creek exists to combat urban blight, not to fill
church coffers. “Will there be a return?” he asks rhetorically. “Yes, but so
modest that you would never have made such an investment— the real return
comes in folks moving back downtown and the revitalization of businesses.”
Pausing briefly, he adds with deliberation, “It’s for furthering the aim of the
church to make, if you will, bad men good, and good men better.”

■ The Church: The imposing Salt Lake Temple took 40 years to build Photograph by Nathanael Turner
for Bloomberg Businessweek

Are you a developer? Try out the HTML to PDF API

open in browser PRO version

pdfcrowd.com

It’s perhaps unsurprising that Mormonism, an indigenous American religion,
would also adopt the country’s secular faith in money. What is remarkable is
how varied the church’s business interests are and that so little is known about
its financial interests. Although a former Mormon bishop is about to receive the
Republican Party’s presidential nomination, and despite a recent public-
relations campaign aimed at combating the perception that it is “secretive,” the
LDS Church remains tight-lipped about its holdings. It offers little financial
transparency even to its members, who are required to tithe 10 percent of their
income to gain access to Mormon temples.

The Mormon Church is hardly the only religious institution to be less than
forthcoming about its wealth; the Catholic Church has been equally opaque
throughout history. On the other hand, says historian D. Michael Quinn, who is
working on a book about the LDS Church’s finances and businesses, “The
Mormon Church is very different than any other church. ... Traditional
Christianity and Judaism make a clear distinction between what is spiritual and
what is temporal, while Mormon theology specifically denies that there is such
a distinction.” To Latter-day Saints, opening megamalls, operating a billion-
dollar media and insurance conglomerate, and running a Polynesian theme
park are all part of doing God’s work. Says Quinn: “In the Mormon
[leadership’s] worldview, it’s as spiritual to give alms to the poor, as the old
phrase goes in the Biblical sense, as it is to make a million dollars.”

Mormons make up only 1.4 percent of the U.S. population, but the church’s
holdings are vast. First among its for-profit enterprises is DMC, which reaps
estimated annual revenue of $1.2 billion from six subsidiaries, according to the
business information and analysis firm Hoover’s Company Records. Those
subsidiaries run a newspaper, 11 radio stations, a TV station, a publishing and
distribution company, a digital media company, a hospitality business, and an
insurance business with assets worth $3.3 billion.

AgReserves, another for-profit Mormon umbrella company, together with other
church-run agricultural affiliates, reportedly owns about 1 million acres in the

Are you a developer? Try out the HTML to PDF API

open in browser PRO version

pdfcrowd.com

continental U.S., on which the church has farms, hunting preserves, orchards,
and ranches. These include the $1 billion, 290,000-acre Deseret Ranches in
Florida, which, in addition to keeping 44,000 cows and 1,300 bulls, also has
citrus, sod, and timber operations. Outside the U.S., AgReserves operates in
Britain, Canada, Australia, Mexico, Argentina, and Brazil. Its Australian
property, valued at $61 million in 1997, has estimated annual sales of $276
million, according to Dun & Bradstreet.

The church also runs several for-profit real estate arms that own, develop, and
manage malls, parking lots, office parks, residential buildings, and more.
Hawaii Reserves, for example, owns or manages more than 7,000 acres on
Oahu, where it maintains commercial and residential buildings, parks, water
and sewage infrastructure, and two cemeteries. Utah Property Management
Associates, a real estate arm of the church, manages portions of City Creek
Center. According to Spencer P. Eccles from the Utah Governor’s Office of
Economic Development, the mall cost the church an estimated $2 billion. It is
only one part of a $5 billion church-funded revamping of downtown Salt Lake
City, according to the Mormon-owned news site KSL. “They run their businesses
like businesses, no bones about it,” says Eccles.

■ The Megamall: The Mormon-owned City Creek Center, completed in five and a half years

:::::: Photograph by Nathanael Turner for Bloomberg Businessweek

In addition, the church owns several nonprofit organizations, some of which
appear to be lucrative. Take, for example, the Polynesian Cultural Center (PCC),
a 42-acre tropical theme park on Oahu’s north shore that hosts luaus, canoe
rides, and tours through seven simulated Polynesian villages. General-
admission adult tickets cost $49.95; VIP tickets cost up to $228.95. In 2010 the
PCC had net assets worth $70 million and collected $23 million in ticket sales
alone, as well as $36 million in tax-free donations. The PCC’s president,
meanwhile, received a salary of $296,000. At the local level, the PCC, opened in
1963, began paying commercial property taxes in 1992, when the Land and Tax
Appeal Court of Hawaii ruled that the theme park “is not for charitable
purposes” and is, in fact, a “commercial enterprise and business undertaking.”
Nevertheless, the tourist destination remains exempt from federal taxes
because the PCC claims to be a “living museum” and an education-oriented
charity that employs students who work at the center to pay their way through
church-run Brigham Young University-Hawaii.

“There are religious groups that own radio stations, but they don’t also own
cattle ranches. There are religious groups that own retreats, but they don’t also
own insurance companies,” says Ryan Cragun, a sociology professor at the
University of Tampa and co-author of the recently published book Could I Vote
for a Mormon for President? “Given their array of corporate interests, it would
probably make more sense to refer to them as The Church of Jesus Christ of
Latter-day Saints Holdings Inc.”

Are you a developer? Try out the HTML to PDF API

open in browser PRO version

pdfcrowd.com

Holy Holdings

An organizational guide to the church’s businesses

Corporation of the President of the Church

of Jesus Christ of Latter-dax Saints

„ 1

1

1 1

1 1

Intellectual Polynesian Corporation of Deseret Education division:

Reserve, owrsecn Cultural Center the Presiding Trust Co. includes Brigham

by the Quorum

Bishop of the

Young University

of llic Twrtur

Church of Jesus

(campuses in Utah,

Apostles

Christ of LDS

, 1 ,

Idaho, and Hawaii)

i

1 1

1

Ensign Peak

Deseret Real estate:

Agriculture:

Advisors

Management Suburban Land

AgReserves,

Corp. Reserve, Property

Farmland Re-

■ Resenr , etc.

serve, etc.

i r

Deseret Beneficial

~T~

Temple Bonneville

~\ 1

Deseret Deseret News

Digital Financial

Square International

Book Co. Publishing Co.

Media Group

Hospitality Corp.

As a religious organization, the LDS Church enjoys several tax advantages. Like
other churches, it is often exempt from paying taxes on the real estate
properties it leases out, even to commercial entities, says tax lawyer David
Miller, who is not Mormon. The church also doesn’t pay taxes on donated funds
and holdings. Mitt Romney and others at Bain Capital, the private equity firm
he co-founded in 1984, gave the Mormon Church millions’ worth of stock
holdings obtained through Bain deals, according to Reuters. Between 1997 and
2009, these included $2 million in Burger King and $1 million in Domino’s Pizza
shares. Under U.S. law, churches can legally turn around and sell donated stock
without paying capital-gains taxes, a clear advantage for both donor and
receiver. The church also makes money through various investment vehicles,
including a trust company and an investment fund called Ensign Peak
Advisors, which employs managers who specialize in international equities,
cash management, fixed income, quantitative investment, and emerging
markets, according to profiles on Linkedln. Public information on Ensign Peak

Are you a developer? Try out the HTML to PDF API

open in browser PRO version

pdfcrowd.com

is sparse. In 2006 one of the fund’s vice presidents, Laurence R. Stay, told the
Mormon-run Deseret News, “As we trade securities, all of the trading happens
essentially with a handshake. ... There’s lots of protections around it, but
billions of dollars change hands every day just based on the ethics of the group
—that people know that they can trust each other.”

According to U.S. law, religions have no obligation to open their books to the
public, and the LDS Church officially stopped reporting any finances in the
early 1960s. In 1997 an investigation by Time used cross-religious comparisons
and internal information to estimate the church’s total value at $30 billion. The
magazine also produced an estimate that $5 billion worth of tithing flows into
the church annually, and that it owned at least $6 billion in stocks and bonds.
The Mormon Church at the time said the estimates were grossly exaggerated,
but a recent investigation by Reuters in collaboration with sociology professor
Cragun estimates that the LDS Church is likely worth $40 billion today and
collects up to $8 billion in tithing each year.

Quinn, a faithful Mormon who spent 12 years on the faculty at the LDS Church’s
Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah, before being excommunicated for
apostasy related to research he published on Mormons, has been gathering
financial information for years. Several high-ranking church insiders told him
that the church’s finances are so compartmentalized that no single person, not
even the president, knows the entirety of its holdings.

If anyone is in a position to know the ins and outs of the LDS businesses, it’s
Keith McMullin. He’s spent the past 17 years serving as the No. 2 counselor in
the church’s so-called Presiding Bishopric, a three-man team that officially
controls church finances and business endeavors and now presides over DMC.
At 70, McMullin is mostly bald, with watery blue eyes behind his unrimmed
specs. He stands about 5’5” and wears fine-quality suits. A gold band on his
right ring finger, set with a red stone the size of a Chiclet, was a present his
parents gave him decades ago for passing the ninth grade. After college,
McMullin worked for three years as an investment and financial analyst at Ford
Motor. He subsequently worked for a few smaller companies before being called

to serve as managing director of the church’s Welfare Services Department and
Are you a developer? Try out the HTML to PDF API

open in browser PRO version

pdfcrowd.com

eventually the Bishopric.

Last April, after completing a 17-year stint, McMullin presumed he was headed
for retirement. It came as a surprise when Monson, the church’s highest-
ranking official, called McMullin into a board meeting and asked him to
become CEO of DMC. McMullin immediately said yes, moving into his new
office days later.

DMC, housed in a boxy complex that also contains some of its subsidiaries as
well as the LDS Business College, sits two blocks west of Temple Square. On the
ground floor, a receptionist greets visitors from behind a plexiglass wall— the
kind that requires people on opposite sides to talk through a telephone. (The
safety glass was added in 1999, after a mentally ill woman entered the building
and shot employees, killing one.)

■ The CEO: Deseret Management's Keith McMullin in his Salt Lake City office Photograph by
Are you a developer? Try out the HTML to PDF API

open in browser PRO version

pdfcrowd.com

Nathanael Turner for Bloomberg Businessweek

McMullin’ s fifth-floor office overlooks an empty parking lot. Sparsely
decorated, the room is entirely clutter-free. A Bible and a Book of Mormon lie
beside a photo of a smiling McMullin and his wife, Carolyn. Seated at a
conference table in late May he told me, “I haven’t had much time to settle in.”

McMullin says the Mormon Church has “two or three or four for-profit entities
under the Presiding Bishopric,” and names DMC, AgReserves, and Suburban
Land Reserve. He says DMC has about “2,000 to 3,000 employees.” He also
confirms Hoover’s estimate that DMC has annual revenue of roughly $1.2
billion, but a church spokesman later writes to say that McMullin retracted his
estimate, claiming that $1.2 billion is “vastly overstated.” He did not offer a new
one.

To understand DMC’s place in the church’s financial structure, it’s important to
start at the very top: The Mormon Church is owned and run by what is called
the Corporation of the President of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day
Saints. This entity is a “corporation sole,” which is an obscure legal body owned
entirely by one person. In the case of the Mormon Church, that person is
Monson, the prophet.

The Mormon presidency is not an elected position, and while the president is
considered a prophet, it’s also not considered a direct appointment from God.
When one president resigns or dies, he is replaced by the longest-serving
member of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles, an ecclesiastic group commonly
referred to as the Apostles. Each new president handpicks two counselors to
help him lead. The three-man team is called the First Presidency.

The church’s “General Authorities”— of which there are more than 100— consist
of the First Presidency, the Presiding Bishopric, the Quorum of Twelve
Apostles, and two other groups, the so-called Quorums of the Seventy.

Although the LDS Church is largely run by a lay clergy, most General
Authorities work full-time and receive salaries from the Corporation of the

Are you a developer? Try out the HTML to PDF API

open in browser PRO version

pdfcrowd.com

President. Until the 1960s, salaries were based on hierarchy, with the prophet
receiving top dollar. This changed when then-President David O. McKay
decided that all General Authorities, including the prophet, should receive
equal pay.

The businessmen who run the church’s for-profit arms, by contrast, likely hold
salaries comparable to what they’d receive in the secular world, says Quinn. In
some cases, individual General Authorities augment their salaries by serving as
board members of the church’s for-profit companies. Several have business
backgrounds. Monson, for example, has a bachelor’s degree in business and
once worked as a newspaper advertising executive.

DMC is overseen by 10 directors: the members of the First Presidency, the
Presiding Bishopric, three senior Apostles, and McMullin. “They give direction
to the overall or umbrella company, but they do not give direct supervision to
the corporate enterprises,” McMullin says. “That’s done through the respective
boards and their executive teams.”

DMC’s decision-making process is fairly standard. “Just as in any corporation,
there are established levels of authority,” explains McMullin. “I can make
decisions up to a certain level, either determined by financial implications or
strategic or tactical implications, and once that limit as defined is met, I go on
to the board of directors for further guidance.” At that point, “strategic
questions are posed, asked, and charted, so the board has a clear idea what the
pluses and minuses are. Those closest to the problems will make
recommendations, and they will be discussed. Often the recommendations will
be accepted. Not always.” That was the process, for example, when DMC
decided last year to sell 17 of its 28 radio stations for $505 million and focus
more on Internet ventures.

Besides having final say on major transactions, the church owns all of DMC’s
shares. And each year the holding company, like all church businesses, donates
10 percent of its income to a church fund. In some cases money flows in the
opposite direction, from the church’s treasury to the businesses. “From time to
time, if there is a particular need, there would be some monies available, but
Are you a developer? Try out the HTML to PDF API

open in browser PRO version

pdfcrowd.com

fortunately over the years that has not been the case very often,” says
McMullin. “If you have a particular reversal in an enterprise, you need to have
some additional cash flow until you work through a difficult time. I’ll give you
an example, we’re going through one right now: It’s called a recession.”
McMullin declined to elaborate on whether the church has been bailing out
subsidiaries.

■ The Publisher: Deseret Book's Sheri Dew, author of 'If Life Were Easy, It Wouldn't Be Hard'

Photograph by Nathanael Turner for Bloomberg Businessweek

Asking your prophet to fund a flailing business can be stressful. Sheri Dew,
chief executive officer of the DMC subsidiary Deseret Book, pulled the publisher

Are you a developer? Try out the HTML to PDF API

open in browser PRO version

pdfcrowd.com

and distributor out of the red 10 years ago. It’s now profitable. “There’s, like,
nothing worse on the planet than to go back to your owner and say, TJh, we
didn’t do what we told you we’d do,’ especially because one of the interesting
things we deal with is that the owner is also an ecclesiastical leader whom we
revere,” she says. “That’s the toughest thing about an organization that’s owned
by the church, because you don’t want to disappoint them, and you don’t want
them to have to worry about what you’re doing, because they have better things
to think about.”

Both McMullin and Dew say that working for the church is more rewarding
than working in the secular world. “When you move from a work environment
that’s made up of salaries and titles and benefits to a work environment that’s
focused on building people and strengthening the lives and well-being of
individuals, you have an entirely different purpose,” says McMullin. Dew, who
has the friendly, no-nonsense manner of a high school basketball coach,
concedes that “some days just drive us all nuts ... but you come to work here
saying, 1 feel like I’m doing something I really care about.’ That’s the
difference, and that’s huge. That keeps me going days when I think, ‘You know,
I hate these 70-hour weeks.’”

Other than the unique pressures and joys of working for your spiritual leader,
church executives say their enterprises aren’t so unusual. “Do we go around in
frocks and pray all the time? The answer is no, we run these like businesses,”
says McMullin. “I have over there a set of scriptures— see those black books over
there? Do I consult those scriptures every time I make a decision? The answer is
no. Do I look to them for guiding and eternal principles on which good, sound
decisions are made? The answer is yes.”

The Mormon belief in the spiritual value of financial success goes back to 1830,
when the religion’s founder, Joseph Smith, announced to his followers that God
had told him the following: “Verily I say unto you, that all things unto me are
spiritual, and not at any time have I given unto you a law which was temporal.”
In other words, historian Quinn translates, “whether it’s investing in a
merchandising store, or tannery, or a lumber mill, or a hotel, or a bank— all of

which occurred under Joseph Smith’s leadership— according to that 1830
Are you a developer? Try out the HTML to PDF API

open in browser PRO version

pdfcrowd.com

revelation, it’s all spiritual.”

In its early days, the church’s entrepreneurial rigor was fueled by necessity.
Mormons, who clashed with neighbors and government authorities over
practices such as polygamy, often had to fend for themselves. The group also
espoused separatist financial goals of “erecting and maintaining an improved
economic system for its members,” according to historian Leonard J. Arrington,
who points out that 88 of Smith’s 112 revelations deal directly or indirectly with
economic matters. When Mormons arrived in Utah in 1847 it was a barren
territory, still under Mexican jurisdiction. To settle the land, Arrington writes,
over a 15-year period in the late 1800s, “Mormons constructed 200 miles of
territorial railroad, a $300,000 woolen mill, a large cotton factory, a wholesale-
retail concern with sales of $6,000,000 a year, more than 150 local general
stores, and at least 500 local cooperative manufacturing and service
enterprises.”

Today, Temple Square is filled with statues glorifying the industry of those
pioneers. The state emblem is a beehive, in honor of diligent work, and the term
“deseret,” used in the titles of many Latter-day enterprises, derived from the
Book of Mormon, means “honeybee.”

These days Mormons use their businesses in part to spread church values. “I
think the reason to have businesses is to communicate and try and have
influence, whether it’s through a book, or through a blog, or a website, or a TV
station, or radio stations, a newspaper, whatever it is,” says Dew, who has
courted controversy in the past for her views opposing gay marriage. “We here
at Deseret Book think families are important, and kids are important, marriage
is important, and values are important ... and if there are ways we can
communicate it, whether through nonfiction or fiction, we want to do it.”

Many Mormons see their church’s economic success as a sign of good
stewardship, but at least a few I spoke to say they are uneasy about the price tag
of the new Mormon mall, the church’s lack of transparency, and its centralized
finances. “The money may be perfectly administered, for all we know,” says

Ron Madson, 57, a lawyer and lifelong Mormon who once served as a church
Are you a developer? Try out the HTML to PDF API

open in browser PRO version

pdfcrowd.com

bishop. “But we don’t know. ... When we see these expenses for the City Creek
Mall, for the hunting preserves, these commercial enterprises, Ensign Peak, we
don’t know where it’s going.”

Until the 1990s, wards— the Mormon equivalent of parishes— kept some
donated member money locally to distribute for aid and activities as they saw
fit. Today all money is wired directly to Salt Lake City. McMullin insists that
not one penny of tithing goes to the church’s for-profit endeavors, but it’s
impossible for church members to know for sure. Although the Mormon
Doctrine and Covenants says “all things shall be done by common consent in the
church,” members are not provided with any financial accounting. Daymon M.
Smith, a Mormon anthropologist, points out that tithing slips read, “Though
reasonable efforts will be made globally to use donations as designated, all
donations become the Church’s property and will be used at the Church’s sole
discretion to further the church’s overall mission.”

According to an official church Welfare Services fact sheet, the church gave $1.3
billion in humanitarian aid in more than 178 countries and territories during
the 25 years between 1985 and 2010. A fact sheet from the previous year
indicates that less than one-third of the sum was monetary assistance, while the
rest was in the form of “material assistance.” All in all, if one were to evenly
distribute that $1.3 billion over a quarter-century, it would mean that the
church gave $52 million annually. A study co-written by Cragun and recently
published in Free Inquiry estimates that the Mormon Church donates only
about 0.7 percent of its annual income to charity; the United Methodist Church
gives about 29 percent.

“Members of our faith are very generous and very sacrificing, very charitable—
they pay tithes and fast offerings, and when they see needs, they address those
needs,” says Madson, the former bishop. “When we see the church not doing the
same things it asks the members to do, we recoil. We wonder, is this looking
more and more like a corporation and less and less like a church?”

Micah Nickolaisen, a 29-year-old photographer and devout Mormon, says City

Creek catalyzed his growing concern about the church’s corporate empire. He
Are you a developer? Try out the HTML to PDF API

open in browser PRO version

pdfcrowd.com

worries that the church gives too little money to humanitarian causes, even
though its leaders like to boast about Mormon welfare programs. “They spent
more money on a mall in three years than they did in 25 on humanitarian aid,”
says Nickolaisen. These Mormons spoke on the record despite fear of
repercussions from family, friends, and church authorities.

Asked about the $1.3 billion estimate of the church’s humanitarian efforts over
the last quarter-century, LDS Church spokesman Michael Purdy writes in an e-
mail, “Though the church’s monetary donations are significant, much of the
‘value’ of our service is not monetary, but in the hundreds of thousands of hours
of service and the talent and expertise given by church members to help others
around the world.”

The LDS Church’s legions of missionaries and volunteers don’t merely spread
the Mormon message around the world; they’re also vital to the church’s
businesses. According to McMullin, DMC alone employs 1,400 “people who are
volunteering their time and their services— some are part-time and some are
volunteer.” Many of these members being asked to serve full- or part-time are
retirees. “They’re making use of the Baby Boom generation, getting them to
serve ‘missions’ doing data entry and all sorts of things,” says Mormon
anthropologist Smith.

Wildlife biologist Clair Huff, for example, took on a two-and-a-half-year unpaid
“senior mission” at the age of 68 to transform 11,000 acres of church-owned
desert into a revenue-generating hunting preserve. At the time, Huff admitted
to Deseret News that he was “reluctant to take on such a monumental task at
first.” He told the paper, “It’s been tough ... but we’re making it work. We don’t
see many people out here, except during hunting season.” Today, Huff and his
wife remember the unpaid mission as a wonderful experience. He says plenty of
volunteers came to help, and that they enjoyed collaborating with six other
senior missionary couples who were working on a nearby church property,
farming and building houses. By the time he and his wife were relieved by
another couple, the private hunting preserve was generating $100,000
annually.

Are you a developer? Try out the HTML to PDF API

open in browser PRO version

pdfcrowd.com

Asked whether there’s any conflict of interest in having devout Mormons
volunteer their services to for-profit enterprises, McMullin says, “Oh, I surely
don’t— no, not in the least. ... When you look at what these companies do, they
are for the purpose of lifting and strengthening people. If individuals want to
come and enlist and participate in that endeavor and do so voluntarily, and the
paid enterprises can provide resources and expertise to help them, I think it’s a
wonderful marriage.” He also says that none of the DMC’s volunteers are senior
missionaries. After my interview with McMullin, a church spokesman clarified
that the majority of the 1,400 “are part-time employees, not volunteers.”

Back in Salt Lake City, at Deseret Book’s headquarters, it’s business as usual for
Sheri Dew, the CEO. A plaque on one wall of the publisher’s entrance foyer
celebrates Joseph Smith as a best-selling author. An identical plaque celebrates
Dew, whose works include two biographies of Mormon Church presidents, one
of a Mormon Miss America, and one book titled If Life Were Easy, It Wouldn’t Be
Hard.

A lunch meeting in Dew’s office begins with bowed heads. “We ask you to bless
our business discussions and our food,” prays one attendee. After saying grace,
the small group launches into a conversation about potential new titles for
Deseret Book’s general audience imprint, Shadow Mountain, which is sold
through Mormon outlets as well as Wal-Mart Stores.

For each proposal, Dew asks, “How does this fit us?” at which point a pitch is
made about the book’s treatment of faith, family, marriage— or at the very least
themes as general as the battle between good and evil.

Dew is proudly working to bring both honor and profit to the church. The more
time you spend with Mormons like her, the less there seems to be a distinction
between the two. Munching on salads and turkey club sandwiches from the new
City Creek Cheesecake Factory, Dew and her colleagues consider aggressive
marketing strategies for an author who has contracts with both Deseret and
Simon & Schuster. “Who wouldn’t want to show up Simon & Schuster?” asks
Dew. “I mean, this is capitalist America, isn’t it?”

Are you a developer? Try out the HTML to PDF API

open in browser PRO version

pdfcrowd.com

Before it's here, it's on the Bloomberg Terminal. CO LEARN MORE

Read More

Deseret Management Corp, Taxes, Real Estate, Utah, Bloomberg
Businessweek, Hawaii, Brigham Young University,

Terms of Service Trademarks Privacy Policy
©2016 Bloomberg L.P. All Rights Reserved

Careers Made in NYC Advertise Ad Choices

Website Feedback Help

open in browser PRO version

Are you a developer? Try out the HTML to PDF API